It’s been kind of a weird messy week, with lots of stuff going on at work, in one way it’s good, since I don’t get bored, there is always new things that needs to be fixed, new fires to put out. But I hope that it will be a bit of a calm down, because around christmas it’s usually really quite a lot going on at our work anyway, at least the first couple of weeks of advent.

I was also in 5 hrs at work over the weekend helping with a migration so the weekend was a bit shorter than normally, but well, at least I’m keeping on going.

Books

I finished up Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, and I understand now where the whole stalker and entire game genres come from, it was pretty fascinating reading through, but also not quite my thing, since most of the people where assholes to each other 90% of the time, and there was constant chainsmoking and drinking all the time, but it was a short one, so it wasn’t that much of it at least.

When I finished up that I though I’ll continue on on another series that I have liked, but not loved so far with Vast by Linda Nagata. The first book in the series had the same asshole problem that Roadside Picnic had, the second one was better. The whole series is quite good at putting me in a kind of icky uncomfortable place, since it’s kind of very far future stuff, and the humans often feel almost as alien as the aliens. We’ll see, hopefully the upwards trajectory so far through the series is contiuning on.

Games

This has been another back and forth week of gaming, I seem to have fallen into a pattern of playing bits of pieces more than I usually do, so again this is kind of a long list.

Ball X Pit is one that I have now kind of gotten into a comfortable pattern of, it’s a game that I have figured out now is best played for about an hour, doing some progress and then playing something else, that way it’s not growing too old, one hour is about 4 runs in, and that’s just enough, funnily enough, now that I got it on my switch I feel like the game is less addictive than it was, and I see that as a good thing.

I’ve also been plugging away at Etrian Oddyssey III and it’s a comforting game, take another delve into the labyrinth, gather stuff, sell, get a bit better, and do the same thing again, It’s also just really fun to explore in the first person view, and it just is a very calming game to me. Etrian Odyssey was what got me into this genere, and I think it will stay one of the ones that I’ll enjoy the most.

For a couple of hours I also did some of Labyrynth of Refrain, and it’s slowly starting to put in more and more stuff, and the game is starting to get a bit more interesting, I’m kind of happy that it’s slow rolling stuff out, it’s a bit easier to follow along, but it seems an interesting game so far at least.

I also started a new save on an old favourite of mine, Siralim, Ultimate which is a really nice creature collector, and one that is very much in how I like them, there’s just a lot of stuff everywhere that you gather together, and a lot of monsters that each have their own traits that you have to mix and match to create a synergistic team, at times it feels more like a deck builder than a monster collector, in a good way.

I finally managed to win a Normal run of Slice and Dice I kind of had lost hope that i would manage, but I actually had a successful run there, now the squad each died multiple times and got resurected, but a win is a win :p It’s still a fun game to play in small intervals, so I just play a couple of fights now and then. I think I will just keep playing on normal or easy for now, because it just is more fun for me, I’m not that great at it.

Media

For some reason there was a big influx of podcasts this week, and my list is huge of things that I want to get listened to, my queue is way larger than normal, so there I have something to work on.

This section was a bit meager this week, but that’s mostly because I don’t really think that there was too much that was out of the ordinary really, at least that I can remember now :)